The first reports said either $100 million or $170 million in bonus payments. But there was a lot of unclarity about what kind of bonuses they were and how many were going to the folks at AIG ‘financial products’ division, where they wrote those credit default swaps that blew up the company and will likely cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
But the Journal says the number is actually $450 million to execs at the financial products division and a $1.2 billion spread across the whole company.
As you can see, despite the fact that this relatively small division of the company created almost all the loses, it’s still drawing in a vastly disproportionate share of the cash bonuses.
